Participants in the United Against Fascism (UAF) march in Edinburgh assemble to provide a counter demonstration to a planned Pegida Scotland rally. March 21, 2015. Lesley Martin/Press Association. All rights reserved.Recently, we have been confronted by the rise of populist political forces supporting authoritarianism all over the world: Trump, Russia’s Putin, France’s Le Pen, Hungary’s Orbán and Erdogan from Turkey all belong to a very specific group, with similar ideological patterns, including disrespect for the elements of democracy; nationalism; using fear as a political tool; inciting anger against minorities, opponents and surrounding nations. Some commentators openly call them fascists and there is some online dispute under way as to whether they belong to the fascist camp. Google them one by one, and you find numerous articles on their fascistic nature, the majority written by journalists or non-experts.
Fascism – minimal definitions
However, the scholarly mainstream tends to avoid using the term: they prefer other expressions instead. The aversion to using the F-word has a long tradition in academe: in his world famous essay published in The American Historical Review in 1979, Gilbert Allardyce called for a virtual ban of the usage of the word, because of its loose character. According to him, fascism was an Italian phenomenon and the word could hardly be deployed in any general way. However, other scholars dealing with fascism (like Ernst Nolte, Stanley G. Payne, Theodor Mommsen, Emilio Gentile) used the world for similar systems outside Italy or Germany (some called these systems ‘fascisms’).
This group set about trying to identify the core elements of fascism. For Payne, for example, fascism included such strands as anti-liberalism, anti-communism, anti-modernism, anti-conservativism, the creation of a collectivist state based on oppression and the existence of a mythic nationhood, a party-army, emphasis on aesthetics and political belief, the tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective.
